Sunday, May 15, 2016

A new musical

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in April 2003)

Since the subject
today is musicals, it’s hard not to go into a reverie about The Band Wagon and Funny Face and Silk Stockings,
to name some of my favourites. But that will have to wait for another day. I’ve
already tipped you off to my preferences though – I’m more an Astaire than a
Kelly man. Not that I haven’t watched The
Pirate and An American in Paris
five times apiece. And I could also rave about A Star is Born, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, etc. etc.

I love musical
theatre too. In the early 90’s, there was a time when I’d seem just about every
big musical then playing on Broadway. Before that, I’d stayed away from the
theatre for years, after a bad experience in London with a production of
Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending.
It supposedly starred Vanessa Redgrave, but from where I was sitting it could
as easily have been Dame Edna Everage. Between the distance, the heat and the
uncomfortable seat (a hard bench actually), I was miserable.

On Broadway

But when I first
visited New York a decade or so later, I had the resources to afford a better
seat, and it seemed crazy not to experience Broadway theatre. So I went to see The Will Rogers Follies, which was a hot
ticket at the time. I loved it. It had literally never occurred to me that
theatre could be so vivid, so bright, so damn entertaining: I was hooked. I saw
Grand Hotel and City of Angels and Kiss of
the Spider Woman – I even saw the legendary flop Nick and Nora, in the narrow gap between the opening and the
closing.

Eventually I stopped
going to New York with the same frequency, but I still catch musicals whenever
I can. On a recent trip to Chicago I saw 42nd
Street and Sunday in the Park with
George – a duo that sums up the breadth of musical theatre: the one brassy
and exuberant and devoted to pure pleasure; the other fiendishly clever and
intricate, but with moment after moment of pure beauty.

I didn’t actually
see the musical Chicago on my trip to
Chicago (it wasn’t playing), but then I’d seen it twice already. The first was
on Broadway, and although we were once again stuck with bad seats, it stands
out as one of the best things I ever saw there. The second time was in Oslo, in
a Norwegian production – and no, I don’t speak Norwegian. It had the feeling of
a somewhat faded facsimile, with some plainly inadequate casting (you don’t
need to speak the language to know a note’s not being hit), but the sheer style
and musicality were again irresistible.

Chicago!

With all of that,
it’s obvious why I was looking forward to Rob Marshall’s new film of Chicago. This project has been in the
works for years (it premiered on Broadway in 1975) – I remember reading about a
proposed film in the mid-80’s, with Goldie Hawn and Liza Minnelli mentioned as
possible stars. The subsequent return to Broadway and the tour circuit came in
a phenomenally popular stripped-down production – there’s no set as such;
everything takes place against a black backdrop with minimal props. As such, it’s
highly and deliberately theatrical – not the most obvious candidate for
translation to the screen.

That’s what I
thought going into the film, and it’s pretty much what I thought coming out.
The film is an able and effective transcription, but adds just about nothing to
the experience of seeing the play. Some may read this and say: well, how could
it? And maybe that’s the right response.

Except that it seems
like such a passive use of the possibilities of cinema – more an archival
function really than an artistic one. On the other hand, nothing kills a
musical like too much cinema. Richard Attenborough, for instance, filmed A Chorus Line in 1985 in a style laden
with fancy angles and edits and movements, and smothered whatever the heart of
the material may be. Marshall avoids the worst excesses of this approach, but
his camera is never as elegant and reflective as Vincente Minnelli’s in The Band Wagon, nor as piercing and
engaged as Bob Fosse’s in Cabaret.
Overall, in fact, his film has a rather cramped, dour look to it.

Fosse’s is the name
most often associated with Chicago
(he directed the original production) – to the point that you hardly hear a
word about John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the music and lyrics. But he’s
actually barely relevant here – Marshall rechoreographed the entire film, and
in a far more generic style than I can imagine Fosse, a famously idiosyncratic
perfectionist, ever being happy with. Kander and Ebb, on the other hand, wrote
a terrific set of songs, most of which made it to the movie intact; the film
wisely also preserves the Broadway orchestrations.

More musicals?

As for the
performers – well, they struck me as a mixed bag. Richard Gere, as the
conniving “razzle-dazzle’ lawyer Billy Flynn, seemed miscast to me. He has the
self-regard, but not the flamboyance; someone like Kevin Kline might have been
better. Renee Zellweger – much the same. She’s committed, but inescapably
pallid; her casting would only have made any sense if the play were being
reimagined in some direction I can’s envisage. Catherine Zeta-Jones seems more
comfortable than the other two put together. She has the poise, the ability to
strut and kick, the authentic hardness that Zellweger lacks. The fact that her
role has been relatively reduced from the stage version, while Zellweger’s has
been relatively expanded, is a distinct miscalculation.

A couple of
reviewers pointed out that the movie’s theme of media manipulation and hunger
for fame are even more timely now than ever, and while that’s true, I can’t see
how the film does much to draw on that timeliness. Marshall keeps the songs
separate from the action, filming them mostly in unadorned settings much like
those of the stage production, and intertwining them with the narrative as a
kind of surreal commentary on or counterpoint to the action. This ought to have
provided a perfect opportunity to inject some Brechtian distance (think again
of Cabaret with its use of the MC),
but that’s far beyond Marshall’s ambition. Actually, the derided 1981 film of Dennis
Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, which
dropped fantasy song and dance scenes into a gloomy Depression-era story, was
more ambitious and intriguing.

Chicago has been a big hit, and of course won the Oscar, so I hope it inspires
more movie musicals over the next few years. If so, then its main service will
have been as the bridge out of the desert we’ve been in since, well, Oliver (which was the last musical to
win the Oscar for best picture, in 1968). Actually, Chicago has much more in common with a spectacle like Oliver than with the films I mentioned
at the start; it smacks more of coordination than of joy, more of perspiration
than inspiration. I enjoyed watching it, but not as much as I would have
enjoyed seeing the stage production again.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).